Our climb of the two the 14ers in the Sangre de Cristo Mtns, named after famous explorers began with a warmup climb of Mt Yale (14,196') in Buena Vista.

Kit Carson offered his services as a guide to John Fremont, and his 5-month journey of exploration, paving the way for westward expansion.

The space shuttle "Challenger", the namesake of the 14er on the same ridge, flew 85% of NASA's space shuttle's missions of space exploration.

The Kit Carson/Challenger climb would be a personal moment of exploration. As Gary Scott said: "In the end it would not be the mountain that I conquered; I might stand on it's summit for a brief moment, but achievement would be in conquering my own doubts and fears."

So the journey began with a backpack up to the basecamp at Willow Lake. We decided to layover one day, to preclude the previous year's attempt by some team members, failing to reach the summit due to exhaustion. We chose to explore the upper reaches of the Willow Creek, and tarn.

We rose at 4:30am, and hit the trail at 5:30. The climb was uneventful, except we got off trail adjacent to the gully at 13,700'. A headwall blocked our climb, and a fin on our left offered a couple of class-4 moves to complete the ascent. Once over the fin, the trail to the top of the saddle connecting the ridgeline to Challenger was obvious.

The cloud-play on our climb was awesome. It's one of those mountain experiences that flatlanders miss.

The night before our climb, our team reversed our previous decision to approach the climb from South Colony Lakes TH, to minimize backpacking exertion. It was unclear whether the route from the Bears Playground would be apparent if the summits were in the clouds. Foremost on our mind was the class-3 downclimb from "Kit-Kat", traversing over to Kit Carson. I talked with a hard-core climber on the summit of Kit Carson who had did that route, and said "the route was dicey". I took this picture of the climber on his return, after leaving the summit.